Dr. Pat Proctor of AAH [Ahoskie Animal Hospital] said Cook and Hinkle had promised to give the animals a good home. However, the mother cat and her two kittens handed over by Dr. Proctor to the PeTA pair were later discovered among the 31 dead animals linked to Hinkle’s and Cook’s possession on the day of their arrest.

Proctor said the cat and two kittens were all in good health and were adoptable.

Roanoke-Chowan New Herald

Unbelievably, PeTA Campaign Coordinator, Chris Link, tried to defend PeTA’s involvement in the killing of an estimated 12,000 animals…

… PeTA “killed over 80 percent of the flesh-and-blood animals it took in” in 2004 and has euthanized more than 12,400 animals since 1998.

Link did not dispute the charges, but defended his group’s actions. “[A]t this point because of the overpopulation, because enough people aren’t spaying and neutering animals and they’re over-breeding ... at this point it is in their best interest to be euthanized,” Link said.

“If they would have died at that shelter they would have been inhumanely gassed with CO2 [carbon dioxide],” Link said. “So the way that we did it was humane. We mainly euthanized them.”

Link added that PeTA does not “support dumping animals the way that they were disposed of, but they were killed in a humane way.”

Townhall.com

Now, I don’t even know where to start with this nonsense.

1) Animal shelters don’t use CO2 to euthanize animals, they use injections just like vets do.

2) Even if they did use CO2 it would actually be a pretty humane way to go as you just go to sleep.

3) Link doesn’t say what method they used to ‘mainly’ euthanize the animals (and I seriously doubt that their drugs and equipment is better than those found in the legitimate animal shelters) so we can’t judge how humane or otherwise it is…

4) … or exactly what he means by ‘mainly’. Was each animal almost euthanized and then hit with blunt instrument to finish it off? Or did they euthanize the majority (by their unspecified method), and have a BBQ with the rest?

To cap it all, PeTA has HUGE amounts of money, especially with their celebrity endorsements (I’m all for celebs trying to do good, I just wish they’d check out exactly what it is they’re putting their names too). So I’d speculate that PeTA could better serve the animals’ ‘best interests’ by spaying and neutering them themselves, and funding animal shelters so that the animals can be looked after.

So where is their money spent since it’s not going on animal welfare?  Big advertising campaigns; massive headquarters that any global capitalist corporation would be proud of; and donations worth thousands of dollars to animal rights extremists for legal fees to defend serious crime like arson – even though PeTA supposedly doesn’t support the use of violence (again, check out the Penn and Teller video).  They also fund deliberate attempts at misinformation as recently highlighted by the US’s Center for Consumer Freedom.

Now, I wouldn’t normally side with the CCF but I was pleased to hear that they’d disrupted a PeTA demonstration in front of the US Department of Agriculture meant to protest the sale of chicken products, read about it here.  In a spirited attempt at misinformation, PeTA were claiming on the basis of no scientific evidence whatsoever that you can get bird flu by eating chickens.

I’m sure there must be a law against deliberate misinformation and attempting to scaremonger, and if there isn’t then there should be.  Perhaps we should all be visiting the CCF’s website to sign the petition to revoke PeTA’s tax free status – the money could go towards genuine information campaigns to promote sensible dialogue around the animal research issue.